Cancer-society ads will focus on need for health coverage

August 31, 2007|By Kevin Sack, the New York Times

ATLANTA -- The American Cancer Society, in a stark departure from past practice, plans to devote its entire $15 million advertising budget this year not to smoking cessation or colorectal screening but to the consequences of inadequate health coverage.

The campaign was born of the group's frustration that cancer rates are not dropping as rapidly as hoped, and of recent research linking a lack of insurance to delays in detecting malignancies.

Though the advertisements are nonpartisan and pointedly avoid specific prescriptions, they are intended to intensify the political focus on an issue already receiving considerable attention from presidential candidates in both parties.

The society's advertisements are unique, according to experts in both philanthropy and advertising, in that disease-fighting charities traditionally limit their public appeals to narrower aspects of prevention or education.

But the leaders of a number of such organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Alzheimer's Association, said they applauded the campaign's message that progress against chronic disease will be halting until the country fixes its health-care system.

As in the past, the heart association is using its advertising dollars these days to promote more rigorous exercise and healthful diets. The most recent cancer-society campaign encouraged screening for colon cancer, including a memorable commercial in which a diner plucked -- and then ate -- a lima-bean polyp from the intestinal tract he had carved in his mashed potatoes.

But John R. Seffrin, chief executive of the cancer society, which is based in Georgia's capital, said his organization had concluded that advances in prevention and research would have little lasting impact if Americans could not afford cancer screening and treatment.

"I believe, if we don't fix the health-care system, that lack of access will be a bigger cancer killer than tobacco," he said in an interview. "The ultimate control of cancer is as much a public-policy issue as it is a medical and scientific issue."

Census figures released this week show that the number and percentage of Americans without health insurance rose last year, to 47 million and 15.8 percent. A 2003 study estimated that one of every 10 cancer patients is uninsured.